


(Alone)^2 = Doomed

by Omorka



Category: Atop the Fourth Wall, That Guy with the Glasses/Channel Awesome, The Spoony Experiment
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Gen, Quasi-Sibling Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-10
Updated: 2015-10-10
Packaged: 2018-04-25 15:51:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4966972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omorka/pseuds/Omorka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Having a hypertime timeline too tangled isn't good for your mental or physical health.  Having two hypertime timelines intertangled?  That's just asking for trouble.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(Alone)^2 = Doomed

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the TGWTG Reverse Big Bang '15 over on LJ, for Lizynob's artwork "I Can't Hate You If We're Dead." This mentions Linkara and Spoony, but it's meant to depict their (fictional) characters, not the real-life web personalities who play them in reviews.

He was alone when it first started.

It wasn’t uncommon for him to be alone. His child was on a play-date, not due to be picked up for another couple of hours. His housemate-landlord was off at someone else’s house chucking dice around. Even the dog had found somewhere else to be.

His hands were so cold, even with the surgical gloves on. Numb. His fingers trembled; he couldn’t feel the pads of his fingerprints against the rubber.

For an instant, he could see through his palms to the steel table below.

He whipped off his goggles, staring. Solid. They were solid again, but still like ice. He couldn’t work like this.

Carefully, he set aside the scalpel and eased himself into a chair, willing the cold to go away, to give him the use of his hands back again.

He almost wished the dog was there. At least it was warm.

\---

He wasn’t alone the first time it happened, because there really wasn’t any such thing as being alone on the ship. The AI was pretty much everywhere, all-seeing.

The old AI hadn’t paid as much attention. He wouldn’t have gotten away with anything if it had been half as alert. Fleetingly, he wondered whether the old AI was still in the memory banks somewhere deep in the ship, or if it had been purged.

It didn’t matter. It had been a very long time since he had not been watched, even if he hadn’t always realized it. 

The first waves hit him like a silent blizzard. He was cold, too cold to shiver, cold from the inside out. When he doubled over, his pancreas and liver somehow turned to ice, the ship asked him in a very polite voice if he needed medical assistance.

“Don’t know,” he gasped, trying to wave her off. “Something warm.”

“Information: Pollo will be arriving with a large mug of hot coffee in 2.3 minutes,” the ship assured him. “The room is currently at 72 degrees Fahrenheit and steady. Your core body temperature is currently 96.6 degrees Fahrenheit and dropping. Question: do you need a blanket?”

“It’s internal,” he forced through chattering teeth. “Blankets won’t help.” Something radically shifted in his chest; he clung to the edge of the workbench as his legs gave out. He felt empty, hollow, as if there were nothing but icy wind where his lungs should be.

“Scanning,” announced the speaker in the ceiling. “You are emitting low-level, low-frequency chronoton radiation.”

“What?” he gasped. “That’s ridiculous. People don’t emit chronotons.” He lost his grip on the bench and slid to the floor.

When the robot arrived, he was barely conscious, but he could breathe again. He reached into Pollo’s chest compartment with trembling fingers and clutched the paper cup gratefully. Somehow, he managed to heave himself close enough to upright to swallow the steaming liquid. 

He wanted to grovel, to plead for help from the two artificial intelligences. What he actually said was, “You really shouldn’t let the water boil while the grounds are in it; it makes it too bitter.”

“I added extra creamer to balance it out,” Pollo replied. “Are you feeling any better?”

“I’m not sure,” he replied. “I’ll have to do some tests.”

Chronoton radiation? Nonsense. The ship’s internal scanners must be off, mustn’t they?

\---

Something was repeatedly hitting the floor in front of him and squeaking shrilly. Something soft; the sound of impact was much quieter than the squeaking.

He opened his eyes and met the wide-open, worried ones of his child. The anemonid boy chirped and chattered rapidly at him, ceasing his frenzied bouncing in favor of a sort of full-body headshake.

“I’m all right, son,” he lied. “I just - I slipped and fell. Knocked myself cold for a few moments.”

Cold. Yes. The universe had frozen solid on him. He’d been unable to move, unable to breathe, stuck in an infinite frozen moment in time. He must have blacked out.

His son squealed and waved his tiny tendrils. He looked in the direction they were pointing, with some difficulty; his neck was stiff, possibly from landing on his shoulder wrong. 

Well, that would explain why he couldn’t feel his feet. They were as transparent as glass, when they were there at all; they seemed to be phasing out of reality and back, on a cycle of about 2.12 seconds.

He pushed himself forward, inching along the tile floor. It should have felt cold except where he’d been lying on it; it was the opposite, lukewarm where his hands fell on it and chilly underneath him, as if he’d been leeching heat from it instead of the other way around.

The feet came with him. That was good. They seemed to stabilize, to stop phasing out of reality, as he moved away from his previous location. That was good, too. 

They were still transparent enough to read through. That was bad.

His child twittered an interrogative at him.

“No, son, there’s no one who can help that I can call,” he answered, summoning up a facade of calmness that he couldn’t imagine actually feeling. “And I don’t think changing my shoes will make any difference, but give me a moment to stand up and I’ll try it.”

\---

Linkara snapped the tricorder shut. “Nimue was right,” he stated. “It’s definitely chronoton radiation, and it’s in quantities too small and at sufficiently low energy levels that we wouldn’t have noticed it if we weren’t deliberately looking for an anomaly.” He scratched his head just under the hatband. “But - why? And why now, all of a sudden?”

“It’s possible that it’s been building up for some time,” Pollo pointed out. “It may only just now have reached a detectable threshold.”

Linksano set down yet another cup of coffee, drained to the dregs. The part of his mind that wasn’t barely being held back from gibbering in terror noted that he should probably switch to decaf for the next one. “That’s entirely possible,” he noted, “but not testable. If it’s below the threshold of detectability, by definition we can’t determine how fast the build-up was.” He rubbed his gloved hands together, generating a little more warmth through the friction. “And it doesn’t explain why I was temporarily incapacitated by it. The readings aren’t any lower now than they were when I was on the floor a couple of hours ago, are they?”

“They are not,” the ship’s voice agreed.

“Is his temperature back to normal?” Linkara asked the sensor on the ceiling.

“He has returned to 98.2 degrees Fahrenheit, which is within a tenth of a degree of normal for him,” Nimue replied.

Linkara blinked. “Wait, he’s not 98.6 like the rest of us?”

“My normal internal operating temperature is 75 degrees,” Pollo reminded him.

Sighing, Linkara corrected himself. “Like the rest of us flesh-and-blood humans, then.”

“No,” Linksano said, “normal body temperature in my home universe is 98.4 degrees, and I’ve always run a little low.”

“Information: A variation of two-tenths of a degree is well within normal human range,” the ship’s computer noted. “Reproductively fertile human females regularly experience more variance over the course of their reproductive cycles.”

“That shouldn’t apply here,” Linksano noted dryly. “I don’t think -” 

He was interrupted by a sudden rushing in his ears. The temperature in the room seemed to spike; the lights became both brighter and bluer. Linkara and Pollo turned into two blurs of motion, brown and blue fluttering and flickering around him.

Forcing his head to move, he looked down. His torso had become cloudy, translucent; he could see a steady fluttering - his heart beating, most likely, since he could feel his pulse elevating.

The air was thick and hot; he could barely manage to breathe it. In comparison, he felt like he’d turned to slush, wet snow barely cohering. He wrapped his arms around his chest, trying to hold himself together.

The brown blur was making noises, he realized. They sounded like the whining of a mosquito, high-pitched, almost out of his range of hearing.

“I’ve been time-shifted,” he shouted at the brown blur. “Or all of you have, one or the other.” That didn’t explain his chest only being half-there, but one problem at a time. If Linkara sounded like a mosquito to him, he must be nearly sub-sonic to the robot and the reviewer.

The brown blur waved something at him, something with blinking lights on it, and buzzed. A flash of white light passed over him, almost too quick to see. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem to have any effect.

The blue blur scanned him with one of its internal sensors. A dull reddish light played over him in a broad beam. That was interesting; he shouldn’t have been able to see that, or at least wouldn’t normally.

As suddenly as it had started, the anomaly stopped; the air became fluid and much cooler, and his chest regained opacity. Perhaps the increased external heat had not entirely been an effect of the temporal anomaly, either; Linkara’s face was beaded with sweat.

“I’m all right,” Linksano croaked. “Or, functional, at least.”

“Thank God,” Linkara sighed. “Well, we know what _isn’t_ causing this, but we still don’t know what is.”

“It’s still relevant information,” Linksano said. “So, how long did that last, from your perspective? And what did you rule out?”

“It’s not magical,” Linkara went on. “I checked for several different types of magic, and it doesn’t match any of them.”

Pollo broke in, “And it’s not any of the standard time-travel or dimensional-travel pathways in the ship’s database. Of those, only plane-jumping should be capable of creating chronoton radiation, and it would be at a much higher frequency than we observed. It took approximately one hundred and eight minutes.”

“From my perspective,” Linksano observed, looking down at his watch, “it took about eight minutes, although I’ll admit it felt like it was much longer.”

“So, slightly more than a thirteen-to-one ratio,” Pollo noted. “I’m not coming up with any obvious matches for that value, but I will continue searching.”

Linkara met Linksano’s eyes, or at least his goggles. “Temporal science really isn’t my area of expertise,” he admitted. “Pretty much all of my superscience other than robotics and the ship itself is really thaumaturgy.”

“I’m aware of that,” Linksano acknowledged. “And - I do appreciate the attempt at rescue.” His voice fell into a lower register. “I am also aware that you have few reasons to value me as an employee.”

Linkara blinked at him. “You’re a member of the team,” he said, as if that were obviously enough.

Linksano pondered that as his employer and the robot bickered for a moment over their readings and decided to return to the apartment to analyze the data. He’d never thought of himself as a team player.

No, ‘never’ was wrong. He hadn’t thought of himself as a team player in a long time, though.

Not since . . . 

As the other two left, Linksano looked up at the pronounced V-motif in the architecture of the lab, of the whole ship, and shuddered.

\---

“Wake up, Insano! God-fucking-dammit, wake up!”

Again with the bouncing. This time, something much heavier was pressing him rhythmically against the floor and shouting.

He opened his eyes and, for a moment, saw himself. No, that was wrong. No goggles, the hair combed differently across a slightly misplaced natural part, different small scars from acne and occasional broken glass. Not him, even if some dead-end turn of an alternate timeline of his had worn that face for a while.

“Spoony, are you trying to perform CPR on me?” he asked. “Because if you are, you’re doing it wrong.” He pushed his roommate-landlord-and-possibly-clone-brother away from him, gently.

“Yeah, sorry, my First Aid certification expired a long time ago,” Spoony said, rocking back on his heels. “Look, what are you doing down here? Because part of the floor disappeared, and I could look straight down from the living room into here, and then parts of the walls sort of turned to blue glowing mist, and it was really freaky.” He pointed up. “The blue mist is gone, but the floor, or I guess ceiling from here, is still fucked up.”

Insano followed Spoony’s finger. Sure enough, there was an irregular hole in the ceiling about four feet in diameter. The edges of it were ringed with fog, and it was slowly getting smaller of its own accord. He studied the parts of the ceiling closest to the mist; they seemed solid enough, and identical to the old ceiling, including occasional chips and stains in the ceiling tiles from the odd explosion.

“I don’t suppose you got any footage of the blue mist?” he asked. It wasn’t great, but any record of an unexplained phenomenon was better than no data at all.

“No,” Spoony answered, “I couldn’t find my camera, and then I noticed that you were fucking passed out or maybe dead on the floor down here; you didn’t look like you were breathing, and at first I thought you’d blown your right hand off, but there wasn’t any blood, and what the fuck is going on with that?”

Again, Insano looked where Spoony told him. His right hand felt cold, but not bitterly so. Like his feet from earlier, it was transparent, and its boundaries seemed a little ripply, more like water than glass. He turned it over, then brought it in front of his face. It appeared to be in one piece.

He peeled off the rubber glove and dangled it from his left index finger. Slowly, like the ceiling, it returned to its normal blue color and solidity. His right hand did not.

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “I haven’t been performing any dimensional phasing experiments. I doubt there’s much new to learn, there.”

“You’re fading out,” Spoony breathed. “Like Marty McFly from the first _Back to the Future_ movie. Have you been time-travelling?”

“No, even I know better than to mess with single-timeline time travel at this point,” Insano scoffed. “Besides, interdimensional travel is so much easier.”

“What about hypertime?” Spoony asked. “Could this be from messing around with hypertime all those times?”

“Surely not,” Insano answered. “The whole point of hypertime is that it is extremely resistant to the ill effects of tampering - it’s practically self-healing.” His right hand’s outline was becoming more solid, but it still looked as if it were made of living water.

“Maybe its idea of self-healing is to eliminate the thing that’s causing the damage,” Spoony insisted.

Insano shook his head and attempted to clamber to his feet. “It’s never worked that way before,” he replied. “Besides, it wouldn’t just be me, then; it’d be you, and the Hero, and that ridiculous echo of me that’s still here for some reason. And you’re all fine.”

“My living room isn’t,” Spoony said, uncharacteristically quietly.

“It will be shortly,” Insano stated. “Look, the hole’s barely half the size it was when you woke me up.” He tried to stride purposefully back to his workstation; he had to settle for staggering in more or less a straight line.

Spoony already had his phone in his hand as he slipped through the door to the stairs.

\---

“Hypertime? That’s an interesting hypothesis,” Linksano said to the viewscreen. “If it’s true, though, testing it without making it worse would be difficult.”

The image of Linkara on the screen fidgeted with the half-disassembled morpher he was holding. “I’m not about to argue with that,” he answered, “and I realize that this is going to sound like a strange suggestion, but - if you and Insano are exhibiting similar symptoms, then maybe you should -”

“No.” Linksano shook his head. “Out of the question.”

Something shifted in Linkara’s expression. Did he suddenly look mistrustful, or was that just a trick of the light? “Why?” asked the viewscreen’s speaker.

Linksano looked off to one side. “He was your archenemy before Lord Vyce, wasn’t he?”

“I guess so.” Now Linkara merely looked puzzled, his eyebrows drawn together. “I don’t think of myself as having archenemies, but maybe he thought of himself that way.”

“Thinks, if his rant in your living room was any indication,” Linksano continued. “And forgive me for my saying so, but working with your archenemies has not yet once done me any good at all.”

“But he’s exhibiting the same symptoms, maybe worse, at least according to Spoony,” Linkara insisted. “And he knows a lot more about hypertime than I do.”

Linksano took a deep breath. “Then perhaps hypertime is about to do you a favor and remove two thorns from your side at once,” he said, and switched off the screen.

He turned his back on the console and contemplated his right hand. It was flickering, like an image on a movie screen from a failing projector. So were parts of the far wall of the lab. If the ship’s computer had noticed yet, she hadn’t said anything.

He couldn’t. Even if Insano wasn’t his boss’s temporally-first and currently-second-most-powerful enemy, he couldn’t work with him. It was hard enough to look at Spoony.

Damn Vyce to the eternal freezing vacuum of space, for ever coming to their world.

And damn him, for his own cowardice.

\---

“No, for the last time, I am not leaving the lab,” Insano insisted against twin protests. “It could be incredibly dangerous.”

“You’re fucking right, it could be incredibly dangerous!” Spoony shouted. Glancing down, he whispered “Sorry,” to the anemonid next to him. The Son of Insano burbled his acceptance of the apology. Spoony continued, “There are holes appearing in the fabric of space and time all over the basement. They’re starting to show up in the rest of the house. I don’t want to know what’s going to happen when they hit something structural!”

“Nothing,” Insano said. It was getting harder to speak; the cold in his chest was constant, now. “They’re still there, they’re just out of phase. When I -” He paused and swallowed hard. “When the anomaly that causes them is pinched out of this reality into its own pocket universe, they’ll all go back to normal. I just have to contain them to a single region until that happens.” He glanced down. “Take care of my son, will you?”

“It’s not just a single region, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” Spoony howled. “Look!” He shoved his phone nearly under Insano’s nose.

It was footage of that stupid spaceship, from the inside. That impostor was stuck in a slow-time anomaly. Spoony swiped the screen; the impostor, his mouth open, his chest and right hand glassy and translucent, vapor forming at his mouth as cold breath hit warm air. An anomaly swallowing part of a blast door.

Insano’s eyebrows jumped from behind his goggles. “Oh, no. Get him out of orbit! A hypertime anomaly in high earth orbit could - I don’t even want to think about - tell your hero friend to get him down from there! Shoot him down, if he has to!”

“He’s not going to shoot his own ship; how would that even work?” Spoony complained, reflexively, before snatching his phone back and hitting speed-dial.

\---

“You’ll have to beam me into deep space,” Linksano said quietly. “It’s the only option that’s safe.”

“No one is beaming anyone into vacuum without a suit,” Linkara shouted, his voice shaking with rage audible even over a voice-only transmission. “And Spoony didn’t sound like ‘safe’ was even an option at this point.”

“It may not be,” Linksano murmured. There were moments, now, when his entire body seemed to be losing solidity. He was so cold he was numb everywhere, and bits of the lab were phasing uncontrollably. “But the farther I am from Earth when the hypertime anomaly collapses, the less I’ll take with me when I go.”

“There’s got to be something we can do!” Linkara’s voice insisted. “Can we time-freeze you? I think there’s a spell that will do that, at least temporarily.”

“Even if you knew it properly and were sure you could cast it,” Linksano said wearily, “I don’t know what the effects of mixing magic and hypertime would be, and I don’t trust at this point that they’d be benign.” His finger hovered over a button on the console. 

“I don’t intend to lose you,” Linkara snapped.

Linksano smiled; it was a pale, mirthless rictus. “You don’t have a choice,” he said, and pressed the button; despite the cold numbness, he could still feel the teleportation effect sweep over him.

He just barely heard the speaker screaming, “Override! Priority One!”

\---

The lab was more anomaly than solid, now. Workbenches and tile floor gave way to featureless grey fog. Insano had stopped trying to stand up; when the uncontrollable shivering from the cold allowed him to use his legs properly, more often than not the floor was merely a polite fiction.

The teleportation effect was a surprise. Well, he had told Spoony to get the impostor out of orbit. He hadn’t told him where to put him. Having all of the hypertime anomaly in one place did make a sort of pragmatic sense.

“Go away,” he snarled anyway.

Linksano blinked. This was clearly not deep space, although where it was was questionable. It didn’t seem to have any orientation, any walls, any floor, although he wasn’t floating, either. Gravity seemed to be working, despite not having any visible surface to stand on.

And there he was. A dead man’s echo.

“I couldn’t go away even if I wanted to,” he answered. “I don’t even know where here is.”

“It’s what the hypertime anomaly has left of my lab,” Insano muttered. “I expect now that we’re both here, it’ll finish pinching us off into a little quantum hypertime bubble universe to starve to death, or freeze, or fade out of existence completely.”

“I’d bet on the last one,” Linksano said, holding up his right hand. It was completely invisible from the fingertips to just above the wrist; his arm didn’t become opaque until just above the elbow.

Insano leaned closer out of curiosity. “Can you still feel your fingers?” he asked, holding up his own right hand; his palm and wrist were still faintly visible, but blurry, as if they were slightly out of focus.

“Not really,” Linksano said, edging closer. “I still have some proprioception, but no tactile or temperature sensation. You?”

“I can still feel cold,” Insano answered. “No tactile sensation, and that was the first thing to go, even before it started fading.” He unfolded his legs. “My feet are going, too, but I can still feel them. The cold hurts.”

Linksano glanced down. “My feet haven’t started going yet, but my chest - I can’t breathe half the time.”

“That only happens to me during the slow-time spells,” Insano noted clinically. His gaze drifted from Linksano’s chest to his face, and he snarled, “You’re only a copy, you know. An impostor.”

“I’m not supposed to be _you_ ,” Linksano snapped back. “Surely you’ve realized that by now?” He tried to bite back the next words, but they slipped out: “Take a closer look, Dr. Schlumper.”

“How do you know - ?” Insano’s eyes went wide behind the goggles as his gaze swept up and down Linksano. His face hardened. “No. No! You’re not Oscar! You’re not him!”

“I’m not _your_ Oscar,” Linksano said. “I couldn’t have gotten here at all, you know, if it hadn’t been for you. You opened the hypertime portal; I just stabilized it long enough to come through it.”

“You can’t be Oscar,” Insano spat. “He’s - he’s gone!”

Linksano edged closer. “Dead?” he asked.

“No, not dead,” Insano shouted. “Just - gone. Gone! When _she_ rejected us, he slipped into a depression. He - he gave up science, he studied philosophy in college, he started wearing silly French hats and smoking clove cigarettes. Ten years ago, he said he didn’t want to have anything more to do with me, that it was just too painful a reminder of how he’d wasted his life.” He shook his head. “I haven’t seen him since. I tried to look him up when I was elected President, pulled his FBI file and everything. He moved to Vancouver and they lost track of him. I sent the CIA after him, but by the time they found a lead I was impeached. I’ve sent out tracker drones, hunted for his DNA traces, trawled cyberspace with killer worms. Nothing.” He slumped to the floor. “He’s gone. He’s all I had.”

Linksano was almost close enough to touch him now. “Have you looked in the closed-circuit camera records? If he’s in Canada, those should be fairly accessible.”

“That was part of what the worm apps were looking for,” Insano muttered miserably, running his still-solid hand through his hair. He glared at Linksano. “And you’re not him, no matter what you say.”

Linksano held out his remaining wrist. “See for yourself,” he said quietly.

Insano’s mouth made a hard line. He reached into his lab coat and removed a small black device. Hesitating, he pressed it against Linksano’s wrist; Linksano winced as a tiny needle pierced his skin and stole a drop of blood.

Insano had eyes only for the readout. Linksano glanced around; the lab had completely disappeared. Even the blue glow of the quantum transition had faded. There was nothing around but the grey blankness of the hypertype metaspace.

“Not possible,” Insano whispered to the display.

“Do you doubt your own science?” Linksano asked, already knowing the answer.

“You can’t be Oscar,” Insano repeated. “He gave it all up, he abandoned Science, he abandoned me . . .”

“I’m not your Oscar,” Linksano agreed.

Insano let out a single breath; vapor formed around it. “And I’m not your Wayne.”

Linksano couldn’t help smiling a little. “Exactly.”

Drawing his knees to his chest, Insano met his gaze. “And what happened to him?”

The smile dissolved. “He’s dead,” Linksano said dully. “Vyce killed him.”

Images he’d long repressed flooded through Linksano’s mind. His brother, his Wayne, a Champion of science rather than magic, building defense after defense. A frontier of laser drones at the edge of their solar system. An array of killer satellites in parallel orbits around their planet. An army of giant robots, prototype Neutros in formation, marching against the Shades.

They’d fallen, every one, before Lord Vyce and his warships. Oh, they’d taken out two; they were - no, Wayne was - the reason Vyce had only the flagship to bring here. But the flagship had made it past every obstacle, and Vyce himself had strode up to the door of their underground layer after three solid years of fighting. It hadn’t even been a struggle. They’d fired every weapon they had, laying waste to waves of Shades, but Vyce himself never flinched.

And then he’d grabbed Wayne by the shoulders and broken his neck like a bird’s.

Linksano - up until that moment, he’d still been Dr. Oscar Schlumper - had looked into that featureless visor and fled into the bowels of their lair without a coherent word. The device had been meant to search for reinforcements across the multiverse; instead, he dialed for a universe far enough away that Vice couldn’t find him but close enough to theirs not to kill him on arrival, and pressed the button.

He’d broken completely, thoroughly, utterly. He’d never been the brave one, never the hero. That was Wayne; that was always Wayne. He’d borrowed his brother’s courage, and when he was gone, he’d shown his true colors and fled like the coward he was.

Wayne’s voice said, “I’m sorry,” and Linksano returned to the moment with a start. There was the right face in front of him, lab coat and goggles and all, but this Wayne was no hero, no champion.

Or was he? Vyce had gone directly for Linkara because of the skinwalker robot and its advice. If Linkara hadn’t been there, would Insano have stood up to him, declaring that no one would conquer this world except for him?

“You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” Linksano said. “You didn’t know anything about Vyce yet.”

“No,” Insano said quietly, “I mean I’m sorry for not realizing you were an alternate universe’s Oscar. I should have recognized you. I was so wrapped up in my own ego, I thought you were just a hypertime imitation of _me_.”

Linksano gave him a half-smile. “In a way, I suppose I am. Everything I am is an imitation of my universe’s Wayne. He was always the smarter one, the braver one. That’s why he’s dead and I survived.”

“Of course I’m the smarter one,” Insano crowed. “In any universe.” His eyes fell to his hand, dissolving slowly into the stream of hypertime. He pushed himself cautiously to his knees.

The line of transparency was nearly to Linksano’s shoulder. “Well,” he said, “at least we don’t appear to be taking the rest of that universe with us. The closed space isn’t getting any bigger.”

“I think it’ll open back up once it’s - digested us,” Insano agreed. Slowly, he held up what remained of his right hand. “But, perhaps - perhaps there’s no reason to dissolve alone?”

Linksano took a moment to realize what his counterpart was saying. “No,” he whispered back. “Not alone, then.” He raised his hand, already gone, to meet Insano’s.

Somewhere, beneath the numbness, there was pressure. Warmth.

“What -?” The question escaped both their mouths at once. Insano raised his gaze from the space where two invisible hands met to Linksano’s goggles; his face was remarkably calm.

Linksano shifted his position to face him straight on. Yes. He could feel Insano’s fingertips against his own, cold and bare but solid.

“Look,” Insano murmured. The line of visibility was traveling back down both their arms, slowly but surely. Linksano’s chest and Insano’s knees were becoming more solid by the second.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Linksano protested weakly. He felt his fingers, glassy but now faintly visible, sliding past Insano’s knuckles; the sensation of pressure burned down nerves that had resigned themselves to oblivion.

“Hypertime field feedback,” Insano theorized. “There are so many of us, in so many universes, we’ve become poles for oppositely polarized hypertime vibrational loops. Your ship wasn’t in geosynchronous orbit, was it?”

“No,” Linksano agreed as their hands appeared, translucent and cloudy against the grey background, their fingers interlaced. “It was too far away from Earth for that to be efficient.”

“So a field built up, your pole and mine in regular motion with respect to each other,” Insano continued, his eyes still fixed on their hands as they re-solidified. “Like two magnets in regular rotational motion with respect to each other create an electrical field, we created a hypertime field strong enough to threaten the fabric of reality.”

“Of course!” Linksano agreed. “Until the perpendicular temporal flux became stressed enough to start producing chronoton radiation. It wasn’t me; it was the field I was unwittingly creating.”

“So the field started producing anomalies to try to neutralize itself,” Insano said, his voice getting louder. “To prevent a catastrophic shift. But what it really needed -”

“- Was for the two poles to come into close enough contact to short out the field,” Linksano realized. “Once you and I were in the same physical space, the field could fold itself out of regular spacetime to prevent damaging the rest of the multiversal continuum, but the field persisted in intensity - just compressed into a much smaller space. To neutralize it -”

“- Requires its two battery poles to be in actual physical contact.” Insano’s hand closed around Linksano’s, both now nearly solid. “And now we are. So now what?”

The featureless grey of the room was beginning to break back up into cloudy swirls. Linksano couldn’t remember the last time he’d been touched. Not just by his brother; by anyone. “I think we could increase the area of contact. That should speed up the reaction.”

Insano frowned slightly. “What would you suggest?”

Linksano grinned manically and leaped at his brother-not-brother, crushing him to his rapidly thawing chest in a bear hug.

\---

“So you literally hugged it out,” Spoony said, shaking his head. At least his living room and basement were back to normal.

“It’s actually worse than that,” Linksano replied, grinning sheepishly. “In order to prevent that from happening again, either I can’t stay on Comicron-1 for extended periods, or if I do, we have to come into physical contact again to let the chronoton charge neutralize.”

“And I need someone on the ship other than just Pollo, and Harvey has too many tour dates to stay up there for too long,” Linkara finished. “So I guess you guys are going to have to schedule regular mad science seminars.”

“There are worse fates,” Insano said cryptically. “And at least we’ll recognize the symptoms if and when it starts happening again.”

His son hopped onto the counter next to him and purred. “Yes, yes,” Insano said, reaching down to pat his child on the head, “I’m glad I wasn’t dissolved forever into the chaotic stream of hypertime, too. I would have hated to miss all those bedtime stories.”

“Well,” Linkara shrugged, “That’s that. Shall we head home?”

“Wait,” Linksano, holding up one hand. He’d put his gloves back on, now that he could see his fingers. “If it’s all right, I’d like to - to compare notes. See exactly where our personal and world timelines diverged.”

“That’s sensitive information,” Insano objected, but he saw the look on Linksano’s face and relented. “Well, all right. For the sake of constructing an accurate timeline. Nothing more.”

“Nothing more,” Linksano agreed, and knew immediately that they were both lying.

Like brothers do.


End file.
